Several people commented on Mark Nutter's review of the KeyFonts package, casting additional light on the package and the problems Mark noted. A few people expressed the opinion that giving 100 fonts, especially lower quality ones, to someone with no design sense was akin to handing a loaded machine gun to a monkey with fleas. Although elitist, such an opinion is understandable when we see some of the abysmal results of desktop publishing. The worst instances of that are behind us (remember when every newsletter used San Francisco?) but it's worth keeping in mind that lots of fonts will not make a well-designed publication.

Gene Steinberg, a consultant for FontBank, writes:

Mark Nutter made a valiant effort in printing out 100 fonts in both Postscript and TrueType format to check the quality of this low-cost font package. However, there are a few fundamentals that serious Mac font users should know that might help explain some of Mr. Nutter's comments.

First, installing both Postscript and TrueType versions of the same font can cause a font conflict, resulting in, as Mr. Nutter reports, missing characters and erratic letterspacing. You have to use either PostScript or TrueType.

Second, the missing optional characters should not be blamed on the need to make these fonts compatible with the DOS/Windows environment. In their text faces, Adobe provides more or less the same character set for both platforms, with the addition of a handful of fraction keys that seem accessible only by PC keyboards. For display faces, based in part on traditional typesetting "film" fonts, the lack of some optional characters is a given. For text faces, it is a serious drawback.

Swanson Clarification -- Mark H. Anbinder writes, "As we reported in last week's issue of TidBITS, there was some confusion as to the details of Randall Swanson's sentence in connection with the MBDF virus case. His attorney contacted us after the issue was published, and he explained the situation. Swanson was not sentenced to serve forty-five weeks of community service; he was given a "conditional discharge." This means that no punitive sentence will be ordered provided that he obeys certain conditions for a period of one year. These conditions essentially amount to an order to "Stay out of trouble." However, Judge Friedlander did suggest that Swanson perform some community service on his own."